The Emory University team, seen here, and its Emora socialbot are the winners of the 2020 Alexa Prize.
The Emory University team and its Emora socialbot are the winners of the 2020 Alexa Prize. Editor's Note: This photo was taken in October 2019, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Thus, team members aren't wearing masks.

Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3

Congratulations to Team Emora from Emory University.

The Emory team, which created the Emora socialbot, is led by PhD student Sarah Fillwock, along with faculty advisor Jinho D. Choi. The team earned $500,000 for its first-place performance. Second place was awarded to Chirpy Cardinal from Stanford and third place to Alquist from the Czech Technical University in Prague.

Amazon wants to thank all of the Alexa Prize teams for their creativity, passion, and contributions to both AI science and delighting Alexa customers.

Winner: Emora

With an average score of 3.8 and average duration of 7 minutes and 37 seconds, team Emora will share the $500,000 prize amongst the student team members.

Second: Chirpy Cardinal

Team Chirpy Cardinal will share a $100,000 prize amongst the student team members.

Third: Alquist

Team Alquist will share a $50,000 prize amongst the student team members.

Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 3
Hear from the contestants, judges, and Alexa scientists—and see the socialbots in action.

Proceedings

Forward
Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge: Yet another year of progression in conversational AI

Introduction
Introduction to the Alexa Prize Proceedings

Amazon Alexa Prize
Further advances in open domain dialog systems in the Third Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge

Emory University - Emora
Emora: An inquisitive social chatbot who cares for you

Stanford University - Chirpy Cardinal
Neural generation meets real people: towards emotionally engaging mixed-initiative conversations

Czech Technical University in Prague - Alquist
Alquist 3.0: Alexa Prize bot using conversational knowledge graph

University of California, Davis - Gunrock
Gunrock 2.0: A user adaptive social conversational system

University of California, Santa Cruz - Athena
Athena: Constructing dialogues dynamically with discourse constraints

Carnegie Mellon University - Tartan
Tartan: A two-tiered dialog framework for multi-domain social chitchat

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology - DREAM
DREAM technical report for the Alexa Prize 2019

University of California, Irvine - ZOTBOT
ZOTBOT: Using reading comprehension and commonsense reasoning in conversational agents

University of California, San Diego - Bernard
Bernard: A stateful neural open-domain socialbot

University of Michigan - Audrey
Audrey: A personalized open-domain conversational bot

You can also download all of the papers in one .zip file.

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
US, CA, Santa Clara
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI, Large Language Model (LLM), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML), Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Responsible AI, Agent, Evaluation, and Model Adaptation. As part of our AI team in Amazon AWS, you will work alongside internationally recognized experts to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in human language technology. Your work will directly impact millions of our customers in the form of products and services, as well as contributing to the wider research community. You will gain hands on experience with Amazon’s heterogeneous text and structured data sources, and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in language understanding. The Science team at AWS Bedrock builds science foundations of Bedrock, which is a fully managed service that makes high-performing foundation models available for use through a unified API. We are adamant about continuously learning state-of-the-art NLP/ML/LLM technology and exploring creative ways to delight our customers. In our daily job we are exposed to large scale NLP needs and we apply rigorous research methods to respond to them with efficient and scalable innovative solutions. At AWS Bedrock, you’ll experience the benefits of working in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment, while leveraging AWS resources, one of the world’s leading cloud companies and you’ll be able to publish your work in top tier conferences and journals. We are building a brand new team to help develop a new NLP service for AWS. You will have the opportunity to conduct novel research and influence the science roadmap and direction of the team. Come join this greenfield opportunity! About the team AWS Bedrock Science Team is a part of AWS Utility Computing AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS’s services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services. About the team Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.
US, WA, Seattle
Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of diversity and inclusion of our teams within the organization. We’re working on the future. If you are seeking an iterative fast-paced environment where you can drive innovation, apply state-of-the-art technologies to solve extreme-scale real world delivery challenges, and provide visible benefit to end-users, this is your opportunity. Come work on the Amazon Prime Air team We're looking for outstanding scientists and engineers who combine superb technical, research and analytical capabilities with a demonstrated ability architect complex hardware, software, embedded, mobile and mission-critical systems to ensure they can be found compliant to DO-178C. This person must be comfortable working with a team of top-notch software, hardware and applied science Engineers. We’re looking for people who innovate and love solving hard problems. You will work hard, have fun, and of course, make history! Export License Control This position may require a deemed export control license for compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Placement is contingent on Amazon’s ability to apply for and obtain an export control license on your behalf. Key job responsibilities The manager of the High Fidelity Modeling group will lead a group of engineers and scientists that provide computational fluid dynamics modeling, as well as aerodynamic and other surrogate models used in flight simulation of the Prime Air drones.
GB, London
We are looking for an Economist to work on exciting and challenging business problems related to Amazon Retail’s worldwide product assortment. You will build innovative solutions based on econometrics, machine learning, and experimentation. You will be part of a interdisciplinary team of economists, product managers, engineers, and scientists, and your work will influence finance and business decisions affecting Amazon’s vast product assortment globally. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you know how to deliver results fast, and you have a deeply quantitative, highly innovative approach to solving problems, and long for the opportunity to build pioneering solutions to challenging problems, we want to talk to you. Key job responsibilities * Work on a challenging problem that has the potential to significantly impact Amazon’s business position * Develop econometric models and experiments to measure the customer and financial impact of Amazon’s product assortment * Collaborate with other scientists at Amazon to deliver measurable progress and change * Influence business leaders based on empirical findings
US, NY, New York
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US, CA, Santa Clara
Are you passionate about applying automated reasoning and program analysis to real world problems? Do you want to create products that help customers? If so, then we have an exciting opportunity for you. We’re looking for an Applied Scientist to help strengthen our customers' security with automation for managed controls. AWS Identity provides the bedrock for secure and continuous access to all AWS services. By quickly connecting millions of users, across the world we empower organizations and enterprises to accelerate their cloud and digital transformation. In this role, you will interact with internal teams and external customers to understand their requirements. You will apply your knowledge to propose innovative solutions, create software prototypes, and productize prototypes into production systems using software development tools and methodologies. In addition, you will support and scale your solutions to meet the ever growing demand of customer use. Key job responsibilities * Interact with various teams to develop an understanding of their security and safety requirements. * Apply the acquired knowledge to build tools and algorithms, find problems, or show the absence of security/safety problems. * Implement these capabilities through the use of Automated Reasoning and various concepts from programming languages. * Perform analysis of the customer systems using tools developed in-house or externally provided * Create software prototypes to verify and validate the devised solutions methodologies; integrate the prototypes into production systems using standard software development tools and methodologies. About the team Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. This team is part of AWS Utility Computing: Utility Computing (UC) AWS Utility Computing (UC) provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS’s services and features apart in the industry. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.
US, WA, Seattle
Economists at Amazon partner closely with senior management, business stakeholders, scientist and engineers, and economist leadership to solve key business problems. As part of the Content Discovery and Experimentation Science team within Prime Video, you will leverage your expertise in causal inference and experimental design to make Prime Video the best-in-class digital video experience. Key job responsibilities - Build causal models and metrics that capture trade-off decisions when business and customer outcomes do not align - Partner with data scientists and product managers to integrate these metrics into Prime Video's experimentation tooling - Work with finance partners to ensure that the team's product metrics contribute to Prime Video's strategic business and financial objectives - Independently write technical and business documents to communicate ideas and proposals to various audiences - Educate and advocate for best practices in experimentation and how to use it for decision-making
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Customer addresses, Geospatial information and Road-network play a crucial role in Amazon Logistics' Delivery Planning systems. We own exciting science problems in the areas of Address Normalization, Geocode learning, Maps learning, Time estimations including route-time, delivery-time, transit-time predictions which are key inputs in delivery planning. As part of the Geospatial science team within Last Mile, you will partner closely with other scientists and engineers in a collegial environment to develop enterprise ML solutions with a clear path to business impact. The setting also gives you an opportunity to think about a complex large-scale problem for multiple years and building increasingly sophisticated solutions year over year. In the process there will be opportunity to innovate, explore SOTA and publish the research in internal and external ML conferences. Successful candidates will have deep knowledge of competing machine learning methods for large scale predictive modelling, natural language processing, semi-supervised & graph based learning. We also look for the experience to graduate prototype models to production and the communication skills to explain complex technical approaches to the stakeholders of varied technical expertise. Here is a glimpse of the problem spaces and technologies that we deal with on a regular basis: 1. De-duping and organizing addresses into hierarchy while handling noisy, inconsistent, localized and multi-lingual user inputs. We do this at the scale of millions of customers for established (US, EU) as well as emerging geographies (IN, MX). We make use of technologies like LLMs, Weak supervision, Graph-based clustering & Entity matching. We also use additional modalities such as building outlines in maps, street view images and 3P datasets, gazetteers. 2. Build a generic ML framework which leverages relationship between places to improve delivery experience by learning precise delivery locations and propagating attributes, such as business hours and safe places. 3. (Work done in sister teams) Developing systems to consume inputs from areal imagery and optimize our maps to enable efficient delivery planning. Also building models to estimate travel time, turn costs, optimal route and defect propensities. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist I, your responsibility will be to deliver on a well defined but complex business problem, explore SOTA technologies including GenAI and customize the large models as suitable for the application. Your job will be to work on a end-to-end business problem from design to experimentation and implementation. There is also an opportunity to work on open ended ML directions within the space and publish the work in prestigious ML conferences. About the team Last Mile Address Intelligence (LMAI) team owns WW charter for address and location learning solutions which are crucial for efficient Last Mile delivery planning. The team works out of Hyderabad and Bangalore offices in India. LMAI is a part of Geospatial science team, which also owns problems in the space of maps learning and travel time estimations. The rest of the Geospatial science team and senior leadership of Last Mile org works out of Bellevue office.
GB, London
We are looking for an Economist to work on exciting and challenging business problems related to Amazon Retail’s worldwide product assortment. You will build innovative solutions based on econometrics, machine learning, and experimentation. You will be part of a interdisciplinary team of economists, product managers, engineers, and scientists, and your work will influence finance and business decisions affecting Amazon’s vast product assortment globally. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you know how to deliver results fast, and you have a deeply quantitative, highly innovative approach to solving problems, and long for the opportunity to build pioneering solutions to challenging problems, we want to talk to you. Key job responsibilities * Work on a challenging problem that has the potential to significantly impact Amazon’s business position * Develop econometric models and experiments to measure the customer and financial impact of Amazon’s product assortment * Collaborate with other scientists at Amazon to deliver measurable progress and change * Influence business leaders based on empirical findings
US, MA, Boston
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US, WA, Bellevue
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